It's a good question. As pg1989 said, this is the basis behind stream ciphers, which are very fast in practice.
I thought I'd quickly expand upon your statement that "the one-time pad is the perfect cipher and impossible to crack." This is true, in a sense, but it's worth pointing out that sometimes an attacker wants to do something simpler than "cracking" ...

First, I'll assume we're talking about encrypting/decrypting exactly 128 bits of data, i.e. the block size of AES. Otherwise, you'll need to specify a mode of operation — and if your data's length isn't a multiple of the block size, well, that'll be more difficult to deal with. So, I'll assume we're working with a single block. (If you are using a mode ...

A key, in the context of symmetric cryptography, is something you keep secret. Anyone who knows your key (or can guess it) can decrypt any data you've encrypted with it (or forge any authentication codes you've calculated with it, etc.).
(There's also "asymmetric" or public key cryptography, where the key effectively has two parts: the private key, which ...

The real security of Vigenère is difficult to quantify. A million character plaintext with a 10 character password is easy to break. But a 10 character plaintext with a 10 character randomly chosen password is essentially a one-time-pad and theoretically unbreakable.
Given the data you've told us (plaintext: 100 to 5000 characters; password: 30 to 100 ...

The Vigenère cipher has many weaknesses, but perhaps the most obvious ones are:
An attacker, who knows (or can guess) as many consecutive characters of any plaintext message as there are in the key, can trivially recover the key and thus decrypt all messages. (In fact, the characters need not even be consecutive, they just need to cover the entire key, or ...

Enigma is not a Feistel cipher. A "Feistel cipher" is a block cipher with a specific structure, namely the whole business with the two halves, the combination of one half with a (one-way) function of the other half and a reversible operation (e.g. XOR), and the swap. See the Wikipedia page which has nice schematics.
So considering Enigma as a kind of ...

Security issues related to block size boil down to the following: a pseudorandom permutation is not a pseudorandom function, and the difference becomes visible when you query the function too many times. Imagine a function which accepts as inputs, and offers as outputs, elements from a set of size $N$. For instance, the inputs and outputs are blocks of $n$ ...

Mathematically, it can probably be done. There has been research into trapdoor block ciphers. See, e.g., A family of trapdoor ciphers by Rijmen and Preneel, and follow-up papers.
In practice, though, the problem statement is not realistic. The assumptions are just not realistic. Today, there's no reason why Red would be limited to using Blue's ciphers. ...

The answer is yes, non-US ciphers exist and are in fact very popular.
Actually, some who are looking for alternatives, opt for non-NSA/NIST ciphers, for instance Salsa/ChaCha from DJB (who is US citizen).
A lot of ciphers have been developed in EU and Japan.
China definitely has developed ciphers for its own use, just like many other countries.
But long ...

Python is a scripting language, so if you've got the program, you usually also have the source code. So you don't even have to reverse-engineer. That doesn't matter much for two reasons:
other languages are pretty easy to reverse engineer (or they are complex for both the programmer and the attacker);
the algorithm does not have to be kept safe anyway, due ...

Your cipher looks a bit like the output feedback mode of operation for block ciphers.
While OFB for block ciphers is considered safe (as long as it is used right), OFB for a hash function like you are using it has the problem that the key is only used at the start, to generate the "initialization vector", not at each step of the algorithm.
Thus, as ...

First of all, this no block cypher at all. It's a stream cypher. Thus you can use every key only once, and you can't use any cypher modes built on block cyphers.
Your scheme is vulnerable to a known plaintext attack. If the attacker knows 32 aligned(or 63 unaligned) bytes of plaintext, he can calculate the state of your cypher:
$ S_i = P_i \oplus C_i $
...

Main drawbacks of DES are:
Small key space (56 bits).
Small blocks (64 bits).
Terrible performance in software, due to all the bit-juggling.
Relative weaknesses with regards to linear and differential cryptanalysis.
Changing any of these will imply heavy changes, not little tweaking. Doing that while maintaining or increasing security is no mere feat... ...

As noted in this answer and this answer to another question, permutation is just a mathematical term for a function $\sigma:X{\rightarrow}X$ that maps a finite set $X$ onto itself, in such way that for each $y \in X$ there exists exactly one $x \in X$ such that $\sigma(x) = y$. This is also equivalent to how the term substitution is used in cryptography, so ...

As an Iranian Cryptology student in one of the most well-known Iranian Universities called Sharif University of Technology, I want to add this to the answers.
There doesn't seem to be any National Standard Cipher here in Iran. But It doesn't mean that there shouldn't be any classified cipher being used by the military or the revolutionary guards. As I am ...

Some brief thoughts:
Shared secret Generation:
$$s=E_a(B)=E_b(A)$$
The shared secret is generated by encrypting the other users public key with your private key. This is effectively an ECDH step, which is very reasonable, and one of the key aims of C25519$^{[1]}$.
Key Generation:
$$s_0=\mathrm{SHA256}(s); s_i=\mathrm{SHA256}(s_{i-1})$$
First, using the ...

Plenty of ciphers come out of the USA from government research or selection competitions. AES and DES are examples.
Indeed, the US is known from some crypto-related competitions that were/are ope to anyone and they surely will do ample of government research related to cyptology, but you need to be sure that you differ between “they selected it” and ...

The point of cryptography is having algorithms that are secure even when the attacker knows them. Google security by obscurity to see why it's bad.
I'll add the following based on otus comment. Python can be reverse engineered, so you can't hide your algorithms. Basically, if someone can run your code, they can reverse engineer the algorithms. The point of ...

It is probably not the case of your example, but in some sense "asymmetric hash functions" do exists: they are called trapdoor hash functions (or also chameleon hash functions).
Very briefly, they are collision resistant only if you don't know their trapdoor secret key.
Such functions take 2 arguments (instead of the usual one), and the second argument is ...

Hashes like SHA-x are symmetric and unkeyed. I have never heard of asymmetric hashes.
Your question is based on a misunderstanding. You can implement computations in an asynchronous fashion, where you request some computation, then your thread is free to do something else, and at some later point when the computation is finished you do something with the ...

The three terms (key, IV, nonce) you mentioned, and another, the salt, basically describe random numbers and each term is used in another context. The key is used as input for a cryptographic primitive and should be kept secret.
A nonce is a random number only used once and for a short time with the intention to get replaced by or converted into something ...

When we consider that a Playfair key consists of the alphabet (reduced to 25 letters) spread on a 5x5 square, that's $25!$ keys (another formulation consider any string to be a key; then strings leading to the same square are equivalent keys).
The rules of Playfair are such that any rotation of the lines in the square, and any rotation of its columns, lead ...

Neither of those really represent how confusion might get introduced into an encryption function. Confusion typically gets introduced during the computation of the ciphertext, not before or after.
As an example, we can look at AES. AES is a substitution-permutation network. This means the encryption is done by doing several rounds of substitutions and then ...

Well, it turns out that depends on what you mean by "the AES cipher".
If you are talking about the block cipher primitive, that is, if you define an alternate block cipher by taking AES, and swapping the 'encrypt' and 'decrypt' directions, well, that alternative block cipher is precisely as strong as AES. It can be used in any mode of operation we would ...

A stream cipher where you can calculate the stream at any offset without deriving the prior stream bytes is probably the simplest option.
AES-CTR is a mode that uses AES like a stream cipher. To decrypt at a random spot, you need only know the offset from the beginning and you can perform a single AES encryption call.
AES-CTR overview: Generate a unique ...

You should think of Rijndael's S-box as a function that maps bytes to bytes, where a byte (octet) is considered to be a member of a finite field of size $2^8$ (with xor as addition). It's not seen as a 16x16 octet array, really.
The substitution is then just done byte-wise: every octet in the 4x4 block is replaced by its function value under the S-box ...

XSalsa20 uses the same cryptographic core as Salsa20 and comes with a security proof that it's secure if Salsa20 is secure. It doesn't use the core of ChaCha and thus has worse diffusion.
The way XSalsa20 works is that it hashes its 256 bit key and the first 128 bits of the nonce using HSalsa down to a 256 bit key and then uses that key together with the ...

Don't bother with changing the actual cipher algorithm. Read about Kerckhoffs's principle: you should only change things like the key and the IV, not the actual algorithm.
In order to test your avalanche, flip one bit in your key. That should change about half the bits in your output.
For cipher design, Applied Cryptography has already been suggested. ...

Well, to figure out this sort of thing, it's easier if we work backwards.
So, we start at the back (the fact that we can store up to 512 characters in a database field), and consider how much binary data we can store. Well, base-4 takes 3 bytes of binary data, and encodes it in 4 bytes of base-64. Thus, we can store 3*(512/4) = 384 bytes of binary ...